Pardon-by-tweet

President Donald Trump was reportedly urged by advisers to restrain himself at a rally in Arizona on Tuesday from announcing a controversial pardon for former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio. Mr Wheat did strongly recommend that any pardon not personally autographed by the president be countersigned by the attorney general. What about a forgery? If the president's Twitter account were hacked and the hacker issued a pardon - would it stand? There's no precedent for that, and it remains "Extremely unlikely", even under the President Trump, that a pardon would be issued by Twitter in the first place, said PS Ruckman, a professor of political science and editor of the Pardon Power Blog. An early and vocal Trump supporter, the former sheriff was also a proponent of the so-called "birther" conspiracy theory, started by Mr Trump, which claimed President Barack Obama was not born in the US..